With our experiments we have shown that consumer IR traffic is not only limited to a line-of-sight connection between sender and receiver. Under perfect circumstances we were able to intercept the traffic at nearly every position inside a room. Furthermore the signal of an ordinary remote control can be correctly received at a distance up to 60 meters. This leads to the fact that a possible attacker must not pass high barriers to create a serious threat scenario. The unencrypted data can easily be intercepted.
Moreover we have shown that it is even possible to reactively jam specific data frames. Although in our tests it is only possible within a line-of-sight, applying stronger IR emitters should even make it possible within a larger area, i.e. a large room. One could argue about the importance of this threat, but this is not on us.
For further work, one could inspect the application of wide-range IR communication systems, such as FSO\footnote{\url{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_optical_communication}} and try to manipulate those signals.
Our whole project is published on Google Code\footnote{\url{http://code.google.com/p/disco-infrared}} in the hope that it will be useful for others also working in this area.